Home

Mrs. Katie Nowak

6B Homeroom, 6-8 Math

314-822-8844 ext.1817

klebbing@sgmschool.org

Welcome to Homeroom 6B and Middle School Math!

I went to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in South County for grade school. After that, I attended Mehlville High School, then went to St. Louis Community College-Meramec where I received my Associate's. I then went to Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, MO, from which I graduated in December of 2014.

I have always liked helping my peers with their math questions, but I specifically remember deciding that I wanted to be a math teacher while I was in high school. This epiphany came after having MANY wonderful math teachers; I hope I can spark a similar interest in my students. This is my first year with my own classroom, though I spent the last year and a half since graduating subbing in Lindbergh School District.

During those 1.5 years, I had four long term subbing assignments, two were 6 days long and the other two were 7+ weeks in length. I primarily subbed in the middle school. Middle school math is my favorite area to teach, so I am thrilled to be the middle school math teacher!

In my spare time, I enjoy watching Cardinals Baseball and I especially like going to the games. I've spent my entire life around drag racing and have been to every NHRA race at Gateway Motorsports Park, previously Gateway International Raceway. When I was in high school, I raced a junior dragster and have been waiting for an oppurtunity to own a race car ever since I aged out of junior dragsters. I also danced from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. My dance teacher recently began having classes for her previous students so I have begun dancing again as well.

When I'm not occupied with any of those activities, I love spending time with my family and friends. I have one brother who is 1.5 years older than me and we have a close relationship. I come from a fairly large family by today's standards. I am the 17th of 20 grandchildren on my dad's side and there are now 22 great-grandchildren and 3 great-great-grandchildren. On my mom's side I am the youngest of six grandchildren and there are nine great-grandchildren. All of my cousins on my mom's side live in Oklahoma or Texas but I am lucky to see most of them at least once a year, if not more frequently. I have a tight knit group of friends that I went to high school with and another group of friends that I still keep in contact with almost daily from grade school.

While at SEMO, I took a history of mathematics course (and it was by far one of my favorite courses), but we were given a research project in which we had to research a mathematician from a specific time period. I chose to research Sophie Germain. Like many women from that time (c. 1800), Germain was so desperate to learn that she disguised herself as a male. She also wrote on many papers under the pen name M. LeBlanc. She spent most of her life reading about mathematics that was already discovered but she chose to work futher with the information she was given. I find this to be a valuable philosophy in education, as the individual is responsible for deciding what they want to do with the information that is given to him or her.

"It matters little who first arrives at an idea. Rather, what is significant is how far that idea can go." - Sophie Germain, female mathematician